ABSTRACT
Seen from the outside, the Hietzing School, a small school that opened in Vienna’s 13th District in 1927, looked more like a New England split-wood cabin than a traditional educational establishment. With just two floors of several rooms each, the school was endearingly nicknamed the “Matchbox” by students and faculty. The Hietzing School opened in the Fall of 1927 in an outlying leafy district of Vienna. The idea grew, in part, out of the search that Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham conducted to find an adequate school for her twelve-year-old son Bob and her three younger children. August Aichhorn was a kind and serious mentor and, according to Anna Freud and many others, “an especially natural teacher.” Aichhorn believed that adopting psychoanalysis in schools could resolve most pedagogical impasses. Hietzing’s perspective did not direct the teachers to give up texts that had long been a mainstay of humanist education, but it did mean approaching study topics differently.
